Tag Archives: debugging

Previously I had mentioned getting windows mobile mochitests up and running. Since then they have been running mostly full time. I calculated out that it would take about 50 hours to run the full test suite assuming there were no errors that caused the browser to not exit automatically. Unfortunately I ran into a block of 234 tests files which over 175 of them fail to execute (no log generated and browser doesn’t terminate within 5 minutes).

These are all dom-level1-core/test_hc_* tests. In trying to debug the problem (by editing a testcase), I found that I could pinpoint an issue, but then it wouldn’t pass twice in a row. Further tinkering showed that about 1 out of 4 times I ran a test (with/without changing it) it would pass. Looking at my log files that I generated during my initial automation pass on the dom-level1-core directory I see the same statistics (1 out of 4 passing) for the fully automated run. Time for a debug build to figure out what is going on.

With a debug build installed, every time I ran a test manually it would pass. The same test that would not pass two times in a row passed 6 times in a row. So much for a debug build helping me out. Next I thought that this might be related to running on a remote web server and one file at a time. I ran a series of tests on desktop Linux Fennec and they all ran end to end without hanging.

This is where I get stuck. My infrastructure is not the problem as the tests obviously run. The problem is they only run *reliably* on debug builds. This all points to some kind of timing issue with WinMo Fennec. Any tips for how to figure out what the problem is?

Earlier this week I spent some time getting xpcshell to run on windows mobile and was excited to use my debugging tips from my last post. After dozens of attempts, I found that running python to launch processes (using osce.py) would not work when launched from Visual Studio debugger. So my debugging is limited to python output and sleep statements so I have time to read it.

Luckily launching other processes like fennec.exe or xpcshell.exe work great from the Visual Studio environment and I was able to get some progress on the reftests.